Thursday, October 18, 2018

Flying Over Trump's Wall

The Washington Post has created an impressive fly-over of the USA - Mexico border. The map takes you on a tour of the entire border, from the west coast to the Gulf of Mexico. The Post's Borderline interactive gives you a complete overview of the invisible and physical barriers which already separate the two countries and the huge job that Trump has ahead of him if he wants to build his wall.

The map provides an oblique bird's eye aerial view of the border. As you scroll down on the page you get to fly along the entire route of the border. As you progress along this border information windows appear which tell you about the existing use of fences or walls along the border. The information windows include quick links which allow you to jump ahead, along the border, to the next annotated part of the Post's interactive.

The Washington Post's interactive map is just the latest in a long line of attempts to map and document the huge job that Donald Trump has set himself. For example the Berliner Morgenpost's Trump Wall Comparison Map allows you to overlay an outline of Trump's proposed border wall between the USA and Mexico on any other location on Earth.

You can also get a good sense of the scale of construction needed to build Trump's wall in a video from the Intercept. The Intercept downloaded and stitched together 200,000 satellite images to create a huge strip map of the U.S.-Mexican border. You can view this strip map in Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border, a short video which pans along the whole border.

KPBS submitted a number of Freedom of Information requests to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in order to learn more about the 653 miles of the wall that already exist. You can explore what they discovered on their interactive map America's Wall. The Reveal has also investigated where the border is already fenced. You can explore Reveal's work on their The Wall interactive map. The map shows the current fence and shows where it is a 'vehicular' and where it is a 'pedestrian' fence. The map also shows where no fence currently exists.